Criminal - Dear Sheila

Episode Date: September 26, 2014

Working as a reporter for a TV station in New Hampshire, Kevin Flynn was covering the capture and arrest of a female serial killer named Sheila LaBarre. As he grew more and more obsessed with LaBarre���s story, Flynn decided to write her a letter. She wrote back. Their correspondence became flirtatious, and eventually he went to visit her in person. We talk with Kevin Flynn and Rebecca Lavoie. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family.

Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Your own weight loss journey is personal. Everyone's diet is different. Everyone's bodies are different. And according to Noom, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Thank you. for a healthier lifestyle. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your free trial today at Noom.com. I mean, the thing I think it's important to say about Kevin is that he is a really, like, deeply nice guy. You know, he's not the kind of person you would meet and think like,

oh, he's like a dark, you know, lost soul. I mean, he's kind of jolly, you know, he has impressions, he's like deeply funny, he's very snarky and just really, really sweet. And so I kind of didn't realize that he had been pulled this far in and that things were getting kind of bad for him really for a little while. I just knew that he was corresponding with a serial killer. And yeah, that was weird. But he was also really nice. So I really didn't think about it that way for a while. This is Rebecca Lavoie, and she's talking about a reporter named Kevin Flynn.

Rebecca is now married to Kevin, but when she first met him in 2007, he was working at a TV station. He was married to someone else and had a kid. He was 37 years old. And like Rebecca said, he was exchanging letters with a serial killer. Flirtatious letters. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. So we were, I should say, I was waiting in the lobby of the police station,

waiting for someone to give me a comment before the 6 o'clock news about what was going on. This is Kevin Flynn. And the wall was sort of paper thin, and I heard two guys walk by, and I recognized the voice of one of them as being with the state police. And he said, I have seen more shit in my life that you would not believe. And then he said, do you think she chopped up the body before she burned it or burned it and then dismembered it? And that's when I heard them say, what is Sheila's date of birth?

And I knew, okay, they're looking for somebody named Sheila. That Sheila was Sheila Labar, a woman who lived on a horse farm on the outskirts of a town named Epping in southeast New Hampshire. Kevin was reporting not far from Epping, where police had found the burned body. It was 2006. Labar had come to New Hampshire from Alabama some 30 years earlier,

responding to a personal ad from a widow doctor. And she responded to the Lonely Hearts ad by sending topless photos of herself. And so she's like in her late 20s. He's in his, I'm thinking like his late 60s. And she comes to town and she moves in on the farm, is super affectionate and sexual with him, but also would go around town dressed very provocatively. And they had a nickname for her around town, which was Sheila the Peeler, because she would definitely like to flash her cleavage. And she was known for answering the door for delivery men wearing lingerie or being naked. When the FedEx guy would come, she would answer completely naked.

Yeah, the plumber, yeah, anybody. The local police actually had a policy that if one of them had to respond to any incident with Sheila, a second officer had to go along. This is like for a police force of I think they had like five or six guys. But they literally had to have backup dealing with Sheila, not because she was violent, but because there was the risk that she would do something sexually provocative and then, you know, sort of, you know, put the patrolman in a compromising position where he has to say, defend himself from an accusation he came on to her or something. So they needed a witness.

Yeah, they needed, absolutely. They needed a witness to sort of verify that, you know, that Sheila wasn't, you know, that Sheila was the instigator of any sort of bad behavior. The guy's name was Kenneth County. He was about 21 years old. He was developmentally delayed. Sheila went on a blind date with Kenny, and Kenny ended up never sort of going back home to his house and his family. He basically immediately moved in to Sheila's farm.

The last time anyone had seen Kenny, he and Labar were in a Walmart. Kenny had bruises all over his face, and Labar was pushing him in a wheelchair. Two police officers showed up and asked Kenny if he was okay. She wouldn't let him answer, wheeled him out of the store, and that's basically the last time anyone saw him. Kenny's mother was growing more concerned about her son and called the cops to do a welfare check. When they went to Sheila's farm,

what they discovered was a burned barrel. You know, it was just like an oil drum that you would throw refuse in and burn leaves or whatever. And they found it was like just like a like a oil drum that you would throw refuse in and burn leaves or whatever and they found it was smoldering and they started to poke around in the barrel and they saw what looked like a human femur with a sort of glob of burnt flesh on the ball joint at the top. And, you know, they realized that the guy that they had been looking for and that they were trying to check on the welfare on, that, you know, it was too late. He was dead and killed in a horrible way. Of course, the bar was not at the

farm when the cops arrived. They combed the hundred acres for any evidence they could find. They even flushed the septic tank. And they did find the remains of another victim, a man named Michael DeLow, she'd been missing for two years. They also found some human toes, but were never able to figure out who they belonged to. Labarre, in the meantime, was on the run.

It was another week before the cops caught her in Massachusetts. She dyed her hair and was staying with some guy she'd just met. He saw her face on TV and turned her in. Sheila Labar was arrested in a Taco Bell and charged with murder. I didn't want to just sort of, you know, reach out to Sheila immediately when she was put behind bars. I think that, you know, I knew that it was going to be at least one, maybe two years before she went to trial. So I waited and didn't write to her until Christmastime. And I figured by that time, all of her friends who had been by her and a lot of her family would have disowned her,

and that would have been a pretty lonely time. And I guess I thought, this is the time she's going to really want to read a letter from somebody who sounds like they're interested in her story. According to Kevin, the first letter said something like, I'm sure this is a difficult time for you. Someday I hope to speak to you. Merry Christmas. And he got a letter back. And then another.

So they went back and forth. It got kind of intense. I remember reading one of the letters that Sheila sent to him. This is Rebecca Lavoie, who we heard from at the beginning. She drew on the outside of the envelope a picture of a rose vine, and they were sort of crossing each other, the rose vine, and it sort of made like a crucifix shape. There was a poem that she had written inside the letter, inside this illustrated envelope, and it was called Two Roses on the Cross, I think it was called. And I remember reading this and thinking like, you know, whoa, like she's, you know, she's, you know, she's really something. And then I remember turning

to Kevin and saying, you know, is she like, you know, kind of going coming after you a little bit? After enough correspondence, Labar agreed to let Kevin visit. At this point, he was thinking this could be more than just a TV interview. He was thinking about writing a book. Sort of early on, she sat down and was very demure and very coquettish and was oozing of Southern charm. And first of all, I could see why men would fall for her and do what she wanted them to do because she was very flattering. At the end of the conversation, she was trying to get me to find her animals from the farm, her horses, her rabbits. What do you mean? She's like straight up saying, can you go check

on my rabbits? She said, can you find them for me? Yeah. Can you find them for me? And I think the idea was... Find them where? Wherever they went. I know that one of them is dead. You know, passed away and I think I shared that

with her and she was, you know, devastated. but she thinks that what I'm going to do is, is find her animals and hold them for safekeeping. And, uh, until she is acquitted and can come home. And that's, you know, sort of where I realized, like I have been totally sucked in. No, I didn't go looking for the animals. I mean, I wasn't going to, if I knew where the horse was, I wasn't going to put it in my backyard. Um, but, but I mean, you're kind of in it deep here. Like, yeah. When do you, when do you realize this is having some like impact on like your personal life, your professional life? It was when, uh, it was when the, um, the, the mailing got to the point where I was getting mail, prison mail from Sheila at work.

And people were opening up the mail and reading the letters out loud, you know, as entertainment. Did you walk in on them reading the letters out loud? No, I wasn't even there. I came back like after a day off. And someone's, you know, I said, someone handed me a letter that had been opened. And I'm like, oh, okay. And then it wasn't until later until somebody said, you know, they opened the letter and they read it at the morning meeting out loud. And I was more than embarrassed.

I felt kind of violated. Why were you embarrassed? What would have been in it that would have been embarrassing to you? I think she was talking sweet to me. I think I might have encouraged it because I thought it just meant the relationship was going on. I was still going to be able to land this big interview when it was all over. And you were married, though. Yeah, and by relationship.

It wasn't romantic. I wasn't trying to seduce her in any way. But it's kind of, I i i believe that kind of of course but like it's kind of like you are in a relationship like your seduction can't feel too false or flirting and all that stuff because she might pick up on that so you kind of do like necessarily enter into this little bit of a it's the reason you were embarrassed, right? Like, there was something there that you were doing that you must have thought, I should be a little embarrassed about.

Yeah, I think you're right. I feel like I kind of lost my way with the story. So I wrote a letter to a prosecutor that I knew. And obviously, you know, they were aware that Sheila was talking to a reporter. And I tried to explain myself to, you know, in a friendly way and saying, look, I just want you to know, you know, I'm not trying to mess up your case. I'm not trying to solve it for you. I'm really just, you know, there to gather information. And I said something along the lines that, hey, if she said something to me, you know, you would know about it. And under the judicial ethics rules of the state, that could be interpreted as the state soliciting my help. With that phrase, I totally screwed the whole thing up.

Now I could be called as a witness in the case. And so now I have a conflict and I can't do the story anymore. Kevin lost his job at the TV station. His first marriage ended around that same time. We asked him if his fixation on the bar had anything to do with his divorce, and he said no. He thinks it's the other way around, that his general unhappiness with life made him a bit reckless and more likely to engage with the bar in the first place. I mean, what I've come to understand was at that time in my life, I was deeply unhappy, you know, in a way that I couldn't articulate or couldn't really feel. I guess advancing the story and getting closer and closer gave me some sense of accomplishment that temporarily filled the void that I had.

And so when it was over, I had lost my job. I had lost my marriage. I was drinking too much. I was gaining weight. And I had a hell of a book. Sheila Labar was charged with two murders, Kenneth County and Michael Deloach. She pled not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury found that she was criminally responsible for their deaths.

They didn't buy the insanity defense, and then she went to state prison. And she has been moved from one state prison to another because with her kind of personality disorder, she gets into trouble and she threatens people and she threatens to burn people. She's currently serving two consecutive life sentences. She has no possibility of parole. Kevin isn't in touch with the bar anymore. He realized it wasn't healthy. Although he does stay in contact with her sister. They're pretty good friends on Facebook. ¶¶ ¶¶ Criminal is produced by Eric Menel, Lauren Sporer, and me.

Julianne Alexander does our episode art. Kevin's book about the Sheila Labar case is called Wicked Intentions, The Sheila Labar Murders. You can find all of our episodes on iTunes or at our website, thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter, at Criminal Show. And we'd love to hear from you. Like what we're doing? Are you getting sick of it? Let us know and leave us a review in iTunes.

I'm Phoebe Judge and this is Criminal. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're content that no one sees and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Autograph Collection Hotels offer over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else.

Hand-selected for their inherent craft, each hotel tells its own unique story through distinctive design and immersive experiences, from medieval falconry to volcanic wine tasting. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of over 30 hotel brands around the world. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com.